Shooting Goals....

In which I totally rip off the idea from ExurbanKevin.

Here are mine....complete with my excuses pre-attached.

• Get to a match once a month....minimum. I enjoy the Tuesday night Sundowner IDPA match over at Phoenix Rod & Gun Club, but it always seems as though there is something that keeps me from my once-a-month ideal. A year ago it was $4/gallon gasoline. My schedule as an airline pilot generally allows me to select one or two days a month that I am guaranteed to be home for, but by the time you put in birthdays, holidays, and other events, making a "Me" day sometimes seems kinda selfish.
• Improve my shooting--which would be the result of any or all of these. My motto, if you will, is: "Surround yourself with excellent people, and then hope one day to be average." With that, I don't mind being among the last guys at the IDPA match. I figure most of these guys are shooting at least one match a week, and given that I show up once a month (if that), then I'm doing OK. But I still would like to improve. It sucks to be last. I went to the state IDPA match last year and despite a more rigorous preparation, I still sucked and was disappointed that I did.
• Related to getting to a match and improving my shooting is that I should get to a IDPA classifier. June would be good, but it will probably have to be later than that. I've got recurrent in June and still need some serious preparation to finish for that, so a June filled with shooting prolly ain't gonna happen.
  
• And Kevin is right: Losing weight would help. In my case, I should be 25 pounds lighter than I am. This too requires a dedication to the gym that I have spent the last 52 years avoiding.
• Dry firing would be good too.
  
• Start reloading. Ammo is getting very hard to find. Couple that with part of me that believes we may be headed to very difficult times (Data point #1, data point #2, data point #3. I could go on, but you get the idea.) and I'm left with the dilemma that every round I practice with today might be a round I might need to shoot tomorrow.
  
  Not long after I got my press, I managed to score some small pistol primers and a small supply of bullets, I just ordered some powder, and of course, I've got tons of brass. But putting it all together and actually doing it is just Another-Thing-To-Do.
  
  I've had a standing request (along with about every other shooter) for 10k small rifle primers since last December, but I don't really have a hope that they'll be delivered. [And I certainly don't have enough .223 ammo to begin the habit of regularly shooting my AR-15.]
  
  I really ought to get started with the reloading...the last .40 ammo I bought was outrageously expensive at the time, and lead bullets. I have found that these leave traces of lead in the polygonally rifled barrels of my HK USP (and will probably do the same on my Glock). I've got copper-clad bullets for the reloading, but only a thousand, so keeping a supply of more of these should become a priority.
• Oh, yeah. I would like to start Three-Gun and get to a formal course too. Not gonna happen anytime soon though.
  

You have got to be freaking kidding me².....

$92 for a box of 1000 small rifle primers, which are unavailable, but listed at Midway for $27.99.

You have got to freaking kidding me......

9mm plinking ammo at nearly $22 a box. At least they have some, which is more than can be said for most ammo retailers, but this is ridiculous.

I am hoping that ammo (and ammo components) is doing today what gasoline did last summer.

Naturally, I blame Obama.

A Little Gun-Bloggin'.....

So anyhoo, yesterday I had the chance to make it out to Dillon Precision for more "stuff" for the RL-550B that Mrs. Azlib got me for Christmas.



I picked up a couple of sets of dies and caliber conversion kits, an extra quick change assembly, and a video detailing how to assemble and set up the press.

I can tell already: Reloading is requiring a steep up-front investment. The press ran the Mrs. $390 or so, and I spent $355 yesterday, and I'm not nearly done. To complete the Dillon hardware I have in mind, I've still got to get a scale (prolly electronic) and maybe their case trimmer, not to mention the odds-and-ends like a bullet puller and a reliable set of calipers (at a minimum). I'll have a $1000 into this thing before I reload the first round. Once I've got that taken care of, I've got to finagle a space to do this work. My first choice (outside building the backyard workshop/storage shed that the wife and I discussed last week) will be to use the "bar" area of the house. That idea prolly isn't going to float (she's got plans for that space already), so I'm left with recovering some garage space for a decent reloading bench. And that will require getting rid of crap cleaning up the things that have accumulated in every corner of my garage.

And then come the components, which have been lately hard (read: "impossible") to find.

The savings of reloading vs. buying factory ammo is substantial, but I still have to get up that slope. I imagine I'll enjoy the reloading, and will certainly enjoy the more-frequent shooting that reloading will allow (not to mention missing the frustrations of ammo unavailability), but this will require some work to get me there. Ah...just what I need: Another project.

However, I also had the opportunity yesterday to stop by the Scottsdale Gun Club.



If you've never been, the SGC is a first-class operation, as you would expect to find in tony Scottsdale. They too are suffering from a shortage of ammo, but otherwise were quite busy. The reasoning behind why gun shops across the country have been busy has been well discussed.

But along these lines, I ran across another in a series of Things-I-Never-Thought-I'd-See....



You can click this cell-phone photo to see what caught my eye. There, in the lower left window of the Suburban in the foreground, is an Obama/Biden sticker. The folks who got out of the Suburban, looking to be a grandmother, a mother, and two teenaged kids, are either the most-clueless fools on the planet, or some of the bravest. I really don't know what to make of their California license plate (which I have obscured). Are they vacationing/visiting from out of state and hoping to take in some forbidden taboo? Was one of the kids researching the guns that are available in nearby Arizona for some term paper? Or are they just generally clueless about the connection between the idiots that they support and what goes on inside the SGC?